By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Heading for Arizona’s international border seems to be almost as popular with U.S. political candidates as with illegal immigrants. The candidates head southward; the aliens come north.
Conservative candidates want to show their seriousness about protecting border integrity and citizens’ safety after the unauthorized entrants show their untrustworthiness about respecting U.S. law.
That crisis assumed such proportions by mid-August that a mild-mannered retired pediatric neurosurgeon on the campaign trail suggested using drones to attack the supply caves of dangerous alien smugglers in southern Arizona.
With border security among his topics, White House hopeful Dr. Ben Carson spoke to a cheering crowd here estimated as high as 12,000 people on August 18, followed the next day by a trip to the border, with southern Arizona sheriffs telling him how seriously the problem looms.
Meanwhile, an opinion column on the general issue of welcoming immigrants in the August 20 issue of the Phoenix diocesan paper, The Catholic Sun, expressed the U.S. bishops’ standard position of assuming the good character of aliens who head here.
“Immigrants don’t come here to steal and commit crimes. They can do that anywhere. They come here for the opportunity for a better life,” the column asserted.
Once again the fact simply was ignored that Barack Obama’s lenience toward illegal immigration lays out a big welcome mat for violent lawbreakers.
Sheriff Paul Babeu, of Pinal County, just southeast of Phoenix’s Maricopa County, briefed candidate Carson on August 19 about alien lawlessness well inside the Arizona border.
California commentator Barbara Simpson wrote in her August 23 weekly column at World Net Daily: “Last week Babeu was on a helicopter tour with . . . Carson, over an area 70 miles inside the U.S. border. The territory was filled with cartel lookouts, drug trails, and caves armed with AK-47s.
“Babeu says the U.S. has no control over this area, part of which is just 30 miles from Phoenix. When I last talked with him about it, he was explicit that the situation has only gotten worse as the cartels move billions of dollars in drugs and thousands of people across the border,” Simpson wrote, adding:
“He’s also furious the feds are releasing violent criminal immigrants onto U.S. streets, and he named three, none of which are from Mexico.”
Carson also walked along a stretch of border fence with Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, whose southeast Arizona territory directly abuts Mexico.
The state’s largest daily paper, the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic, said Carson said he’d use “every means possible” to reduce illegal border crossings to “very few.”
The generally liberal Republic, which favors “comprehensive immigration reform,” gave Carson the entire bottom half of Page 9 on August 20 under the page-wide headline, “Carson calls for deploying more military at U.S.-Mexico border.” On the front page, a small photo and summary referred readers to this coverage.
Although some subsequent news reports said Carson wanted to use the drones against human beings, the Republic story didn’t make that claim, and Carson denied saying so. The Republic quoted Carson:
“Some of these caves that are out there, one drone strike and, poof, they’re gone. And they’re easy to find. . . . Let this become a military issue instead of a bureaucrats issue.”
On August 24 the conservative redalertpolitics.com site, noting Carson’s denial of wanting to use drones against people, commented: “Whether drone strikes and border intelligence could be reliable enough to destroy those caves without injuring anyone is an open question, but American experience with drones overseas gives enough evidence for skepticism.”
Tucson NBC television affiliate KVOA, Channel 4, reported that local ranchers told Carson “they want more boots on the ground along the border instead (of) several miles away from the fence.”
Some opponents of the Obama administration say the open-borders president pulls border agents away from the international line so illegal entrants have less difficulty coming here.
Carson also raised the possibility of terrorists using the porous territory to enter the U.S.
An August 19 news report on Phoenix radio station KFNX (1100 AM) played Carson’s voice saying, “There are radical, global jihadists who want to destroy us and our way of life, and we cannot let them in.”
The conservative Washington Free Beacon website had reported on August 17: “Muslim terrorists are using Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. southern border to plan attacks on the United States from within, according to Sun City Cell, a documentary produced in collaboration between Judicial Watch and TheBlaze TV.”
Weak or non-existent border enforcement, long a dream of the U.S.’s open-borders elite, has only worsened under Obama.
On March 31, 2014, The Hill national political news website reported, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials last year released 68,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions, undercutting Democratic claims that President Obama has strictly enforced immigration laws.
“An internal Department of Homeland Security document compiling statistics on arrests and deportations in 2013 showed that ICE agents encountered 193,357 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions but issued charging documents for only 125,478. More than 67,800 were released,” The Hill added.
It quoted U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), “The preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that immigration enforcement in America has collapsed. Even those with criminal convictions are being released. DHS is a department in crisis.”
Just after Carson’s visit to the border, national radio talk host Sean Hannity on August 20, citing the DHS releasing violent alien criminals into Arizona, said, “People are dying because Republicans don’t have a spine to stand up to this issue.”
And Pinal County Sheriff Babeu, guesting on Hannity’s program, said that eight drug-cartel members tried to outrun his deputies at 100 mph the previous evening. “It happens every day,” Babeu said.
The sheriff told Hannity, “Enough of us being shouted down by this president . . . I’ve had enough of this crap.”
On August 17 the Conservative Review website posted: “The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has published another blockbuster report on immigration numbers, and their analysis foreshadows a troubling trend of growing illegal immigration. Using the most up-to-date census data, they have uncovered a trend that has been lost from some of the traditional immigration-related data published by the Department of Homeland Security, which tends to lag behind the most recent trends.”
An August 18 article at the National Review website about Obama’s failed policies asked whether U.S. groveling before illegal immigration has won this nation praise and deference because of “the singular kindness of the United States in absorbing a tenth of the population of its neighbor by waiving all considerations of legality?
“Or,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson, “did the shrill complaints of racism, nativism, and xenophobia only accelerate as more impoverished refugees made their way into postmodern California and found themselves exempt from enforcement of the laws — and, by extension, without much respect for a country that itself had no respect for its own legal system?”
Hanson concluded by asking, “In a system of closed borders, immediate and permanent deportation for criminal activity, and no sanctuary cities, would the illegal immigrant have more or less respect for his hosts?”
Do walls and guards really work? Just have a look at any diocesan chancery, the White House, or the Vatican. Bishops, presidents, and Popes don’t have their desks right next to the sidewalk, with maybe only a shower curtain protecting them around the clock.
At no point did the August 20 column in The Catholic Sun cited above about welcoming immigrants suggest that native lands have any responsibility for improving their own people’s lives.
Instead, because the U.S. recognizes “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” immigrants should be able to make their claims to receive all of them here, the columnist said. (But why not exercise their purported formidable skills back at home to attain them, improving their lands of birth?)
“So to deny those who want to come here in search of that — that see1ms pretty illogical at best and downright selfish and hypocritical at worst,” wrote the columnist, who apparently needs to inspect a few smugglers’ caves containing AK-47s and join in 100 mph chases of drug smugglers right in southern Arizona.
The Wanderer asked a southern Arizona Catholic woman about Pope Francis’s reported desire to join illegal immigrants coming across the U.S. border if he only had the time to do so.
One might think that instead of pressuring the U.S., the Pope would more effectively spend his time seeking justice by pounding on the desks of Latino oligarchs who refuse to help their own countrymen.
The Arizona woman, who asked not to be named because of concern for her family members on both sides of the border, said:
“I find it concerning that both the American bishops and the Mexican bishops fail to support and encourage the Church’s teaching that people have a right to find the means to acquire their human needs for themselves in their own homeland. Rather, they support the most disruptive option of leaving family and culture for a life of struggle in a foreign land. They also forget the teaching that although people have a right to emigrate, they have no absolute right to immigrate into other countries.
“If they do immigrate, the Catechism says they have a duty to follow the laws of the host country,” she continued, adding: “For Pope Francis willingly to propose to accompany non-refugees or asylum-seekers to illegally enter America is scandalous and illegal. How could a leader of the Church do such a thing in direct contradiction to the Catechism?. . .
“My thought is that these leaders of the Church are guilty of the negative and sometimes fatal results that result because of their public support for the illegal acts of others,” the woman said. “The illegality is bad enough, but it seems that these illegal economic opportunists are also being encouraged to break the Commandments to not covet or steal. Truly scandalous from a bishop. Appalling and heart-breaking from a Pope.”
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